When Black Duck acquired Ohloh back in 2010, the site included many features that hadn’t stood the test of time well. For example, the “journals” feature wasn’t used much with the advent of social media, and so we removed it. The discovered license data in Ohloh’s project analysis is generated with a simple regex. This approach has several problems. First off, the analysis is simplistic. Beyond the count of files with regex hits, Ohloh provides no additional detail, and you can’t see which files are marked with which license. Second, it isn’t clear how someone should interpret and respond to this information. And third, there are quite a few projects where the results may be confusing, or even worse make users or committers nervous about these projects without reason. Still, it is a long-standing feature of the site so we’ve been hesitant to just deprecate it. We’ve given it some more thought and we have to ask, does it even make sense to have this?

Our principal goal with Ohloh is to provide accurate, up-to-date information on FOSS projects, and we feel that this feature doesn’t meet that standard. Black Duck is the industry leader in delivering valuable information about FOSS, and we feel that it isn’t appropriate for Ohloh to provide misleading or incomplete data about project licenses. If we re-implement this feature sometime in the future, Ohloh will present discovered license data that you can confidently rely on.

About Rich Sands

I’m the Principal and Founder of RSands Consulting, a developer/FOSS strategy, product management, and marketing consultancy. Formerly Ohloh’s PM, Black Duck is now a client of mine.